Food: Waste is a serious climate issue; here’s a win-win solution
Fight climate change by preventing food waste
A few simple steps could help reduce the environmental impacts of wasted food
Today, an estimated one-third of all the food produced in the world goes to waste. That’s equal to about 1.3 billion tons of fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, seafood, and grains that either never leave the farm, get lost or spoiled during distribution, or are thrown away in hotels, grocery stores, restaurants, schools, or home kitchens. It could be enough calories to feed every undernourished person on the planet.
But wasted food isn’t just a social or humanitarian concern—it’s an environmental one. When we waste food, we also waste all the energy and water it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and package it. And if food goes to the landfill and rots, it produces methane—a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide. About 6%-8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced if we stop wasting food. In the US alone, the production of lost or wasted food generates the equivalent of 32.6 million cars’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions.
As the world’s population continues to grow, our challenge should not be how to grow more food, but to feed more people while wasting less of what we already produce. Thankfully, there are plenty of actions we can take at the consumer level to make a significant difference. From delivering leftovers to those in need to freezing food, shopping smarter, and composting to keep inedible scraps out of landfills, we can all take small steps to curb our emissions.
© WWF/Richard Stonehouse
© WWF/Richard StonehouseHere are a few tips to help you get started:
- Plan ahead and buy only what you need. Going to the store without a plan or on an empty stomach can lead to buying more than we need. To keep your kitchen on track, try to eat leftovers, think of meals you might eat out, and avoid unnecessary purchases by planning your grocery list ahead of time.
- Use your freezer. While there are plenty of benefits to eating fresh food, frozen foods can be just as nutritious. They also stay edible for much longer. A lot of seafood, for example, is frozen before it reaches your supermarket and then thawed and put on display. That means it will only stay fresh for a few days. By buying frozen seafood, you can extend the shelf life of the product considerably. Cooking and freezing food—especially produce—before it goes bad is a great way to avoid having to toss it.
- Be creative with leftovers. Before you shop, use the food you already have. Websites like Big Oven, Supercook, and MyFridgeFood allow you to search for recipes based on ingredients already in your kitchen. You can also use apps like Epicurious and Allrecipes to make the most of what’s in your fridge and pantry.
- Blend, bake, or boil. Fruits and vegetables that are beyond ripe may not look pretty, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still taste delicious in recipes. Try using your wilting, browning, or imperfect produce to make sweet smoothies, bread, jams, sauces, or soup stocks.
- Talk it up. Preventing food waste is the most effective way to shrink its impact on the planet. If we avoid producing food that we don’t eat, we can save the land, water, and energy that would have been used to make it. And awareness is a good first step; according to ReFED, educating consumers about food waste could prevent 7.41 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
New App Saves Restaurants Money, Reduces Waste, and Feeds Hungry
Meal Pass Gives Restaurants Tax Breaks While Uplifting Santa Barbara Community
It’s a problem that seems to come with a solution: According to census data, one out of every six Americans lacks stable access to nutritious food, and yet 30 to 40 percent of the food supply from restaurants and supermarkets winds up in landfills every year.
Meanwhile, countless charities offer direct access to those hungry people, but they lack steady, efficient partnerships with the restaurants and markets that have extra food at the end of each day. Even the government stands ready to help, offering significant tax deductions for donated food, albeit requiring cumbersome paperwork to realize those benefits.
Leave it to Aussies with tech backgrounds to solve this puzzle.
Jason and Kim Graham-Nye are the cofounders of Meal Pass, a new app that connects the above dots, thereby cutting down food waste, directly feeding the hungry, saving restaurants money with ease, and dramatically boosting the impact of participating nonprofits. Said Jason Graham-Nye, “It never paid so well to do so good.”
Last month, the couple — who are dedicated to developing more sustainable, circular economies and also founded the successful gDiapers [CQ] company — launched the app with Santa Barbara as the test market. They’ve so far enlisted 15 restaurants and numerous nonprofits to donate more than 6,000 meals, “that would have otherwise been thrown away,” said Graham-Nye. “On average, every month participating restaurants are generating $4,000 in tax deductions.”
They chose Santa Barbara as a launch point because they have friends here who’ve invested in the company, and find it similar to their home in Bombay Beach, outside of Sydney. “It’s very beautiful, but also struggling with a lot of inequality,” he said. “If there are ways we can address that inequality, we’d love to be part of it.”
The basic way Meal Pass works is “quite elegant,” said Graham-Nye. After every lunch and dinner, restaurant managers can enter the amount of meals they have to give away after that shift. The app then accesses a database of hungry clients from the participating charities and puts the available meals on a map. Those in search of meals claim them via the app and go pick it up for themselves at the restaurant. The donation is tallied for the restaurant’s tax records. “Meals” range from unserved entrees and sandwiches in deli cases to unused foods that a chef whips up into a meal at the end of a shift. “We access that food and put it directly in the hands of people who need it,” he said.
The need for a service like this will only increase, as a new California law that goes into effect next month demands that supermarkets do more to cut down on their waste. Large restaurants will fall under the same rules in a couple of years. New York is considering similar laws, and other states are sure to follow.
That increasing volume is where Meal Pass, which is a for-profit business, sees room for growth. The company charges 5 percent of a restaurant’s tax savings, but there is no fee to sign up. Graham-Nye has not found a direct competitor yet. “There is clear air where we are,” he said.
While feeding the hungry and fighting food waste are the most environmentally and socially impactful goals of Meal Pass, Graham-Nye believes it can be a critical tool in helping restaurants survive and thrive into the future.
“Restaurants are coming out of a hellacious time, and now their operating expenses are soaring and it’s difficult to get staff in,” he said. “If there is a way we can help them build back better, we would love it.”
See mealpass.org or email jason@mealpass.org to learn more.